ercourse with the most enlightened class of the
community, that is, with the best authors and the best readers,
partake of the intelligence around them; their great capitals, too,
are productive of good and evil in literature; useful when they carry
on great works, and pernicious when they sanction indifferent ones.
Yet are they but commercial men. A trader can never be deemed a
patron, for it would be romantic to purchase what is not saleable; and
where no favour is conferred, there is no patronage.

Authors continue poor, and booksellers become opulent; an extraordinary
result! Booksellers are not agents for authors, but proprietors of
their works; so that the perpetual revenues of literature are solely
in the possession of the trade.

Is it then wonderful that even successful authors are indigent? They
are heirs to fortunes, but by a strange singularity they are
disinherited at their birth; for, on the publication of their works,
these cease to be their own property. Let that natural property be
secured, and a good book would be an inheritance, a leasehold or a
freehold, as you choose it; it might at least last out a generation,
and descend to the author's blood, were they permitted to live on
their father's glory, as in all other property they do on his
industry.[10] Something of this nature has been instituted in France,
where the descendants of Corneille and Moliere retain a claim on the
theatres whenever the dramas of their great ancestors are performed.
In that country, literature has ever received peculiar honours--it was
there decreed, in the affair of Crebillon, that literary productions
are not seizable by creditors.[11]

The history of literary property in this country might form as
ludicrous a narrative as Lucian's "true history." It was a long while
doubtful whether any such thing existed, at the very time when
booksellers were assigning over the perpetual copyrights of books, and
making them the subject of family settlements for the provision of
their wives and children! When Tonson, in 1739, obtained an injunction
to restrain another bookseller from printing Milton's "Paradise
Lost," he brought into court as a proof of his title an assignment of
the original copyright, made over by the sublime poet in 1667, which
was read. Milton received for this assignment the sum which we all
know--Tonson and all his family and assignees rode in their carriages
with the profits of the five-pound epic.[12]

The v